by Anthology
“What?” Lane blinked. No one was supposed to alter major historical events just because they hadn’t worked properly. Or what this generation thought of as properly. “They can’t do that. It’s not legal.”
“We started our policy before it was illegal,” Carnelius intoned from his corner. As if that made it right. There were laws in place to cover such things. Otherwise someone could go back in time and do something that wasn’t a crime then, but was now, and be completely immune from prosecution.
Lane started to say that, but Tsu shook her head. Tsu, who looked as angry as Huntingdon.
“Forgive me, sir,” Lane said to the Fed Chair, knowing he was out of turn. “But we’re all forbidden from messing with Time.”
“Yes, we are,” Singh said, taking the focus off Carnelius. “The Fed knows that now. But they started before the rest of us. Interestingly enough, they had time travel devices long before anyone else did. And they did things that they’ve been trying to clean up ever since. You’re probably most familiar with the Flash Crash of 2010? That was an error on the part of the time travelers from the International Monetary Fund, who are tied into this as well.”
“I don’t understand,” Lane said.
“Someone,” Huntingdon said, “and no one will say who . . .” and with that she looked at Carnelius, “tried to use a time device in 1920. And then tried to cover it up. Which why all the original detectives from the Bureau of Investigation to the New York Police Department to the private detectives had no real idea what happened, because all of their theories were true.”
Lane got cold. A messy cover-up led to conflicting time stories, which led to bad investigations, which lead to chaos that often cost lives. Like it had in this instance.
“We cannot investigate the so-called bombing without making matters worse,” Huntingdon said. “So call off your people. And when you hit a similar time-guarded moment related to something financial, check before you send investigators into the past.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier if we knew what periods to avoid?” Lane asked Huntingdon.
Her lower jaw moved slightly before she responded. “It would. And yet, apparently, the Fed is not in the business of making our lives easier.”
Carnelius shook his head slightly, as if no one understood him.
Lane filtered several responses before he said the one thing he felt he had the right to say, “We’ve been working on the Wall Street Bombing for nearly a year of our time. We’ve used a lot of resources. Why has this just come up now?”
“Because,” Carnelius said, “one of your operatives stumbled on some of ours.”
“Who?” Lane asked. “And when?”
“In 1920. Miss Philippa—Darcy? D’Arco? She stumbled on my people. The moment they found out who she was, they sent word to us.”
Time didn’t work that way, but the language didn’t keep up. They’d found out in 1920, but when had they discovered it in 2057? Or had they? How had word gotten back? Lane didn’t know, and he had a hunch everyone would say he didn’t have the right to ask.
“When can we get her back?” he asked. That at least, would be a victory. He wouldn’t have lost an investigator to this ridiculous operation.
“They won’t give her back,” Huntingdon said, the frustration clear in her voice.
“See here, Kayla. It’s not quite like that,” Singh said.
“She can’t come back,” Tsu said. “She knows too much.”
“She’s ours now,” Carnelius said. “You don’t need to worry about her. We’ll take good care of her.”
“Like you took good care of Wall Street in 1920?” Lane snapped.
“Prescott,” Singh said. “Some respect.”
“Yes, respect would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it?” Lane said as he got up. “Thirty-eight dead, hundreds more injured, in what history considers the worst act of terrorism on American soil until a bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995? All caused by some idiots mishandling time travel for the Federal Reserve.”
“Technically, it wasn’t us,” Carnelius said. “We’re not the only Central Bank with time travel capabilities.”
“Oh, that makes it so much better.” Lane spread his hands on the tabletop and looked at Huntingdon. “I’m going to tender my resignation.”
“And I’ll have to refuse it,” she said. “With this kind of secret, you have just become a lifer in the Time Division.”
Lane’s breath caught. He felt a moment of terror that he then suppressed. “You can’t do that. I serve at the whim of the President.”
“And at whose whim does the President serve?” Tsu muttered.
“Enough,” Singh said. “This meeting is over. And it never happened.”
“Of course not.” Lane felt dizzy. “Just like I never lost an investigator.”
“You didn’t lose her,” Carnelius said. “You simply transferred her to a better paying job.”
“I did nothing of the sort,” Lane said. “I want that on the record.”
“What record?” Huntingdon asked. “This meeting never happened.”
Lane tilted his head back. His brain hurt. And this wasn’t even a time paradox. It was a political one, with real repercussions on real people’s lives.
“When will you return her to us?” he asked.
“We won’t,” Carnelius said. “She’s ours now. Forever.”
That would have sounded ominous outside of the Bubble. Inside it, it was damn near terrifying.
“I suppose you won’t tell me what that means,” Lane said.
“It means she’s elsewhen.” Carnelius stood. “And that’s all I’m going to say.”
Manhattan
September 1, 2088 (supposedly)
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Philippa said. She sat on what looked like air, a clear chair that was more comfortable than anything she felt in weeks. “I have to stay here?”
“Not here, exactly,” said the man who had dragged her. His name was Roland Karinki, and he worked for the Time Unit in the Federal Reserve. At the moment, they were in the Manhattan Fed, in a room that literally vanished in the clouds. “You’re free to leave this job, to do whatever you want.”
“But I can’t go home,” she said.
“If by that you mean 2057, no, you cannot. It’s forbidden to you now. But we can use your services here or in the distant past. We have a lot to do.”
She tried not to look panicked. She tried not to be panicked. Her training had warned her that she might get stuck out of her time. It wasn’t supposed to bother her. She was positively bloodless, after all.
But she didn’t feel bloodless.
“I liked 2057,” she said. “No, I loved 2057.”
“I believe you,” Karinki said. “At least you’re not trying to lie to me by saying that you’re leaving behind friends and family. I know Time Division forbids both of those.”
“Not friends,” she said, although if she were being truthful, she had not been encouraged to have good friends.
Which made her wonder about all those girls she’d worked with in the House of Morgan. Had they made it out safely? Were they badly wounded? Would she ever know?
“You’ll like it better here,” Karinki said. “I promise.”
“Promises from a man who grabbed me and tossed me into a room, then took me out of my life. Great. How do I know I can trust you?”
“Because,” he said, “I have orders from your boss. Do you recall Prescott Lane? He left a file for you, which you can view at your leisure.”
She narrowed her gaze. “I know nothing about 2088. You could have faked it.”
“I could have,” Karinki said. “But I didn’t. We didn’t. And we will help you adjust.”
She leaned her head back, and thought for a moment. She was somewhen else. That was what she wanted when she woke up this morning in that wretched two-room flat, with two smelly girls beside her on a flea-ridden mattress. And she had a hunch the food would be better than it had been in 192
0. The attitudes would be better as well. And then there was the matter of comfort.
Maybe she was positively bloodless. Because she could feel herself transitioning to the new when.
“I need a hot shower,” she said. “Some new clothes. And a bed in place that has climate control.”
“That’s easy,” Karinki said. “How about dinner?”
“Sure,” she said. “Alone. In my new apartment. With all kinds of information at my fingertips about the last thirty-one years. I won’t make decision until I know what my options are.”
“Fair enough,” he said, and then extended his hand. “Welcome to the future.”
She looked at his palm. It was clean, but it had bite marks on the fleshy part that he hadn’t yet cleaned up.
“It sure as hell better be nicer than the past,” she said.
“Time periods are never one thing,” he said. “You should know that.”
She did know it. Maybe better than he did.
Maybe better than anyone.
She looked out that window at Lower Manhattan. Sunlight reflected off the Equitable Building struggling to survive between skyscrapers she couldn’t identify. Through the buildings’ canyons, she saw the Upper Bay, Battery Park, and a clean Statue of Liberty. Saw New Jersey in the distance.
“What month is it?” she asked.
He grinned. “September.”
She looked outside again, but not down this time. Up, like people on the sidewalks in 1920. She saw a clear blue September sky. The kind that promised one of those spectacular New York days, the kind that made you wonder why you lived anywhere else.
“I’m staying in Manhattan,” she said. “I don’t care when. But I do care where.”
He studied her for a moment, then nodded. “We can arrange that.”
“Good,” she said. “Because I wouldn’t work for you any other way.”
THE KING OF WHERE-I-GO
Howard Waldrop
When I was eight, in 1954, my sister caught polio.
It wasn’t my fault, although it took twenty years before I talked myself out of believing it was. See, we had this fight . . .
We were at my paternal grandparents’ house in Alabama, where we were always taken in the summer, either being driven from Texas to there on Memorial Day and picked up on the Fourth of July, or taken the Fourth and retrieved Labor Day weekend, just before school started again in Texas.
This was the first of the two times when we spent the whole summer in Alabama. Our parents were taking a break from us for three entire months. We essentially ran wild all that time. This was a whole new experience. Ten years later, when it happened the second time, we would return to find our parents separated—me and my sister living with my mother in a garage apartment that backed up on the railroad tracks and my father living in what was a former motel that had been turned into day-laborer apartments a half-mile away.
Our father worked as an assembler in a radio factory that would go out of business in the early l960s, when the Japanese started making them better, smaller, and cheaper. Our mother worked in the Ben Franklin 5¢-10¢-25¢ store downtown. Our father had to carpool every day into a Dallas suburb, so he would come and get the car one day a week. We would be going to junior high by then, and it was two blocks away.
But that was in the future. This was the summer of 1954.
Every two weeks we would get in our aunt’s purple Kaiser and she would drive us the forty-five miles to our maternal grandparents’ farm in the next county, and we would spend the next two weeks there. Then they’d come and get us after two weeks and bring us back. Like the movie title says, two weeks in another town.
We were back for the second time at the paternal grandparents’ place. It was after the Fourth of July because there were burned patches on my grandfather’s lower field where they’d had to go beat out the fires started by errant Roman candles and skyrockets.
There was a concrete walk up to the porch of our grandparents’ house that divided the lawn in two. The house was three miles out of town; some time in the 1980s the city limits would move past the place when a highway bypass was built to rejoin the highway that went through town and the town made a landgrab.
On the left side of the lawn we’d set up a croquet game (the croquet set would cost a small fortune now, I realize, though neither my grandparents or aunt was what people called well-off).
My sister and I were playing. My grandfather had gone off to his job somewhere in the county. My grandmother was lying down, with what was probably a migraine, or maybe the start of the cancer that would kill her in a few years. (For those not raised in the South: in older homes the bedroom was also the front parlor—there was a stove, chairs for entertaining, and the beds in the main room of the house.) The bed my grandmother lay on was next to the front window.
My sister Ethel did something wrong in the game. Usually I would have been out fishing from before sunup until after dark with a few breaks during the day when I’d have to come back to the house. Breakfast was always made by my grandfather—who had a field holler that carried a mile, which he would let out from the back porch when breakfast was ready, and I’d come reluctantly back from the Big Pond. My grandfather used a third of a pound of coffee a day, and he percolated it for at least fifteen minutes—you could stand a spoon up in it. Then lunch, which in the South is called dinner, when my aunt would come out from her job in town and eat with me and my sister, my grandmother, and any cousins, uncles, or kin who dropped by (always arranged ahead of time, I’m sure), then supper, the evening meal, after my grandfather got home. Usually I went fishing after that, too, until it got too dark to see and the water moccasins came out.
But this morning we were playing croquet and it was still cool so I must have come back from fishing for some reason and been snookered into playing croquet.
“Hey! You can’t do that!” I yelled at my sister.
“Do what?” she yelled back.
“Whatever you just did!” I said.
“I didn’t do anything!” she yelled.
“You children please be quiet,” yelled my grandmother from her bed by the window.
“You cheated!” I yelled at my sister.
“I did not!” she hollered back.
One thing led to another and my sister hit me between the eyes with the green-striped croquet mallet about as hard as a six-year-old can hit. I went down in a heap near a wicket. I sat up, grabbed the blue croquet ball, and threw it as hard as I could into my sister’s right kneecap. She went down screaming.
My grandmother was now standing outside the screen door on the porch (which rich people called a verandah) in her housecoat.
“I asked you children to be quiet, please,” she said.
“You shut up!” said my sister, holding her knee and crying.
My forehead had swelled up to the size of an apple.
My grandmother moved like the wind then, like Roger Bannister who had just broken the four-minute mile. Suddenly there was a willow switch in her hand and she had my sister’s right arm and she was tanning her hide with the switch.
So here was my sister, screaming in two kinds of pain and regretting the invention of language and my grandmother was saying with every movement of her arm, “Don’t-you-ever-tell-me-to-shut-up-young-lady!”
She left her in a screaming pile and went back into the house and lay down to start dying some more.
I was well-pleased, with the casual cruelty of childhood, that I would never-ever-in-my-wildest-dreams ever tell my grandmother to shut up.
I got up, picked up my rod and tackle box, and went back over the hill to the Big Pond, which is what I would rather have been doing than playing croquet anyway.
That night my sister got what we thought was a cold, in the middle of July.
Next day, she was in the hospital with polio.
My aunt Noni had had a best friend who got poliomyelitis when they were nine, just after WWI, about the time Franklin Delano Rooseve
lt had gotten his. (Roosevelt had been president longer than anybody, through the Depression the grownups were always talking about, and WWII, which was the exciting part of the history books you never got to in school. He’d died at the end of the war, more than a year before I was born. Then the president had been Truman, and now it was Ike.) My aunt knew what to do and had Ethel in the hospital quick. It probably saved my sister’s life, and at least saved her from an iron lung, if it were going to be that kind of polio.
You can’t imagine how much those pictures in newsreels scared us all— rows of kids, only their heads sticking out of what looked like long tubular industrial washing machines. Polio attacked many things; it could make it so you couldn’t breathe on your own—the iron lung was alternately a hypo- and hyperbaric chamber—it did the work of your diaphragm. This still being in vacuum-tube radio times, miniaturization hadn’t set in, so the things weighed a ton. They made noises like breathing, too, which made them even creepier.
If you were in one, there was a little mirror over your head (you were lying down) where you could look at yourself; you couldn’t look anywhere else.
Normally that summer we would have gone, every three days or so, with our aunt back to town after dinner and gone to the swimming pool in town. But it was closed because of the polio scare, and so was the theater. (They didn’t want young people congregating in one place so the disease could quickly spread.) So what you ended up with was a town full of bored school kids and teenagers out of school for the summer with nothing to do. Not what a Baptist town really cares for.
Of course you could swim in a lake or something. But the nearest lake was miles out of town. If you couldn’t hitch a ride or find someone to drive you there, you were S.O.L. You could go to the drive-ins for movies. The nearest one was at the edge of the next county—again you needed someone with wheels, although once there you could sit on top of the car and watch the movie, leaving the car itself to the grownups or older teenage brothers and sisters. (They’d even taken away the seats in front of the snack bar where once you could sit like in a regular theater, only with a cloud of mosquitoes eating you all up—again because of polio.)